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Is this possible...on a budget?

----Background information-------------------------
I disabled internet access to my brothers wireless card in a computer that he was using and he decided, while I was asleep, to take my laptop and use it to get online...here's the problem. After restarting the computer and discovering that It was blocked with a password. He decided to take one of the ubuntu disk I have lying around, and installed Ubuntu on my laptop. (which is totally awesome, but he really picked the wrong time to experiment with linux)

So I woke up this morning and he shutdown the laptop and started smiling before I could see the screen. I turned it on and was horrified when I saw the ubuntu login window. All I could think about was the data I had lost...ipod videos that had not finished being converted, the Azureus downloads that hadn't finished downloading...the bookmarks I had saved for the upcomming IT talent search competition at the local Tech University...just a lot of data that had value to me.

He wouldn't tell me the password or username so I popped in BT3 and took care of that issue (his password was 1 character).

Next I had to deal with the issue of recovering the lost data. The problem I know have is that I don't know how to recover data from a formatted hard drive.
-----------End of Background Info---------------

---Actual Question-----------------
I was originally running windows XP with an NTFS formatted hard drive. the hard drive is now formatted as EXT3. I tried to run ntfsundelete and that didn't work, and I have no idea how to use foremost yet. But now I'm wondering if anyone can point me in the right direction to recover data from a hard disk that's been formatted to a different file system than the on where the "deleted" files are.

If your computer is in any type of environment where anyone who has access to it can not be trusted, the second thing you should always do is change your boot order, while the first would be setting a password on the bios. It's not an unstoppable solution, for laptops it's a pretty strong start and you're data would probably still be there right now since in order to reset the bios he would have needed to take the laptop apart.

As far as your problem, you gotta look for a program that supports recovery from formatted drives. Active Undelete would be a good start. Keep in mind, however, that there is absolutely no garuntee you're going to get any of your data back. There's a good possibility that it's mostly unrecoverable so don't get your hopes up.

If your computer is in any type of environment where anyone who has access to it can not be trusted, the second thing you should always do is change your boot order, while the first would be setting a password on the bios

lol, true. Whenever I'm at work the first thing I do before I walk away from my computer is press WindowsKey+L to lock the workstation. I stopped using bios passwords long ago, but I see now that I'm going to have to go back to doing that. I made an image of the disk and right now I'm seeing how r-studio's recovery software works. I've recovered files before but never after a format. So of course I'm prepared to accept the outcome of everything being gone forever, but I still need to learn more about data recoveryu I guess.

Maybe your files are still there but on a separate partition. You can try 'fdisk /dev/hda' to view the partitions and set which one to be active. You might have to reinstall the boot loader afterwards.